The grading period is over, and teachers are feeling pretty good about themselves. They have just finished assigning grades, that great culminating activity of the teaching profession.
As at the last judgment, students are sorted into the wheat and the chaff. Rewards of A's and B's go out to the good, and punishments of F's are doled out to the bad. “Gifts” of D's (D's are always gifts) are meted out, and C's (that wonderfully tepid grade) are bestowed on those whose names teachers can rarely remember.
The act of giving a grade is usually a solitary one. Teachers sit in judgment not before the skeptical eye of the world, but alone, and the grade given is seldom questioned, not even by its receiver. Teachers no longer command the automatic respect of their charges, no longer wield great paddles to enforce discipline, no longer are considered the last bastion of knowledge. But the giving of the grade makes up for some of that. It marks the lives of those who receive it. It may not be imprinted on the forehead, but it certainly leaves an impression.
As a high school English teacher, grades were important to me. I worked long and hard on them, trying to judge with equanimity, but feeling secretly happy when a deserving student won his or her A or an equally deserving one snagged the F. I didn't give the grades, you see; the students earned them. They got what they deserved. I just computed the averages.
The doubts began when I accepted a Learning Disabilities position. The first time I saw a big, strapping sophomore break into tears at the thought of failing 1st grade (we called it “retention” to soften the blow), I thought the kid was really just a sissy. But it happened again and again. I will carry with me to my grave the look of students who were shunted into a typing class in the hopes that typing would improve their ability to differentiate among letters of the alphabet. That look included anger, self-hatred, and a deep-seated bitterness toward a system that was supposed to be supportive, not destructive. It was frustrating for these students who could never type the required 30 words per minute to try and try and still earn what they deserved, an F. I could never again suggest that an LD student face that agony.
As with most changes of heart, though, my beliefs about grades did not turn on these professional experiences alone.
Our daughter had her first seizure at the age of 5. The mode of treatment was to place her on a drug that kept her in a semi-stupor for over a year until we had her medication changed. In that critical period she was a student in a school system that did not believe in giving letter grades to children in the primary grades. Those magnificent teachers worked with Carolyn through kindergarten, 1st, and most of 2nd grade. While she progressed slowly, she did progress. She and her friend “played school” constantly and seemed to look forward to each day.
Then we moved to a different city. In the spring of 2nd grade, Carolyn was enrolled in her new school in a city that believes in grading primary students.
On her first day, she brought home five F papers. The next day, an equal number of failures came home. Calls to the teacher with explanations of the circumstances went unheeded. The last straw came when Carolyn brought home a paper requiring her to order the events of a story, a difficult concept for her. She ordered the events perfectly, but “earned” an F because she had used too much paste as she laid out the cut-outs on her paper.
A particularly sharp exchange ensued between my wife and I and her teacher, and the teacher mellowed some, but the damage had been done. Carolyn hated school. She did not want to go. She became inured to the grading process, and she avoided homework like the plague. These were her ways of coping. Through the years, Carolyn warmed to a few of her teachers. Meanwhile, her mother and I worked hard to de-emphasize the grades she received and tried to stress her strengths. I suppose that some teachers saw us as the typically over-protective parents who believed their daughter was better than she was. But we refused to believe that the grades were a true reflection of her abilities.
To those who cry that grades teach students what is important and what is not, I would say that I agree. They certainly taught my daughter that the system believed it was she who was not important. While her mother and I work doggedly to assure her of her intrinsic value, the judgment of those from the outside seems to count more than ours over the years.
My experiences have taught me that the grading system is not only educationally unsound, but it is also the source of some degree of evil. Not only does it label students, but it is also the source of that caste system we call tracking and the particularly hideous practice of assigning class rank. As we re-think the way we educate our future generations, I hope that we cast aside our grading system and focus, instead, on the process of learning.
